Related papers: Pushing the complexity barrier: diminishing return…
The ongoing globalisation of science has undisputedly a major impact on how and where scientific research is being conducted nowadays. Yet, the big picture remains blurred. It is largely unknown where this process is heading, and at which…
In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the…
This brief article presents the introduction and draft of the fundamental ideas developed at length in the book of the same title, which gives a challenging point of view about science and its history/philosophy/sociology. Science is in…
Weather prediction is one of the greatest scientific and technical successes of the last century. Today, National Meteorological Services routinely produce forecasts that have a major positive impact across society and many economic…
China's remarkable gains in science over the past 25 years have been well documented (e.g., Jin and Rousseau, 2005a; Zhou and Leydesdorff, 2006; Shelton & Foland, 2009) but it is less well known that China and the United States have become…
Short-term survival and an exuberant plunge into building our future are generating a new kind of unintended consequence -- hidden fragility. This is a direct effect of the sophistication and structural complexity of the socio-technical…
In business, politics and life, folk wisdom encourages people to aim for above-average results, but to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Here, we mathematically formalize and extend this folk wisdom. We model a time-limited…
The advent of digital computing in the 1950s sparked a revolution in the science of weather and climate. Meteorology, long based on extrapolating patterns in space and time, gave way to computational methods in a decade of advances in…
High skill labour is an important factor underpinning the competitive advantage of modern economies. Therefore, attracting and retaining scientists has become a major concern for migration policy. In this work, we study the migration of…
How does the published scientific literature used by scientific community? Many previous studies make analysis on the static usage data. In this research, we propose the concept of dynamic usage data. Based on the platform of…
The way science is currently practiced shows conclusions but hides how they were reached. Researchers work privately, polish their results, publish a finished paper, and defend it. Errors are punished by retraction rather than corrected by…
The scientific process is a means to turn the results of experiments into knowledge about the world in which we live. Much research effort has been directed toward automating this process. To do this, one needs to formulate the scientific…
We estimate the relative likelihood of success in the searches for primitive versus intelligent life on other planets. Taking into account the larger search volume for detectable artificial electromagnetic signals, we conclude that both…
Government funding agencies and foundations tend to perceive novelty as necessary for scientific impact and hence prefer to fund novel instead of incremental projects. Evidence linking novelty and the eventual impact of a grant is…
Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in the cross-border collaboration mode of researchers, with countries increasingly cooperating and competing with one another. It is crucial for leaders in academia and policy to understand the…
This paper overviews the economics of scientific grants, focusing on the interplay between the inherent uncertainty in research, researchers' incentives, and grant design. Grants differ from traditional market systems and other science and…
Science of science has become a popular topic that attracts great attentions from the research community. The development of data analytics technologies and the readily available scholarly data enable the exploration of data-driven…
The cost of the impacts of climate change have already proven to be larger than previously believed. Understanding the costs and benefits of adapting to the changing climate is necessary to make targeted and appropriate investment…
Data science has been described as the fourth paradigm for scientific discovery. The latest wave of data science research, pertaining to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), is growing exponentially and garnering millions of…
How should software engineering be adapted for Computational Science (CS)? If we understood that, then we could better support software sustainability, verifiability, reproducibility, comprehension, and usability for CS community. For…